Winter Wonderland

Winter Wonderland

Sequoia National Park is nothing less than a winter wonderland. Snow clad trees, beautiful drive, fresh snow, reachable location, that was what I wanted for our anniversary. I liked it better than Tahoe. Especially to me; All that I want is no skiing, not much crowd and just a quite weekend.

Our anniversary comfortably fell on Sunday, giving us the weekend to drive to a place and come back by Sunday. Sequoia is not very far from SFO. From San Jose,CA, it was a 4 hour drive for us. We rented out a car from the airport early Saturday morning, to make sure we reach the place by afternoon. Though there was fresh snow on the Sierras, the drive was very peaceful. It’s probably that all the crowd was escaping to Yosemite and Tahoe for skiing. It was continuously raining on the drive and as were getting close to the destination, it meant that there was fresh snow on the mountains. The raining day, however, made the drive much more beautiful.

Sequoia is more of a peaceful, relaxing, just roam around kinda snow place. You have ample places for snow tubing or just walking by and playing with snow. Three Rivers is the closest town. Just being at the base of the snow mountains, it has more hotels than anything else. The stay was very cozy. A river flows next to the most of the three rivers area. As we visited in Feb, the river was not following in its full strength, but on the best spring day , its supposed to look like this..

But you know what the best thing is when you go out a cold place where you don’t get anything other than amreecan food…Having this….

As we drove up the mountain, world got whiter and brighter. snow flakes started showing up and the rain slowly turned into snow fall.

Sequoia is home to giant trees which are like the biggest trees you could ever imagine (My imagination is pretty bad, so I got the details from Wiki. The biggest tree is about 80m tall.) Apart from the big trees and very very picturesque locations,the place has some great hike trails. If visited in Spring or summer, it would be awesome to do any of these hikes. We didn’t really get into some serious hike this time as we had only two days and wanted a sort of relaxing weekend.

Here is video I shot that should tell you how heavenly this place is…

Returning to the hotel by evening, all that we could do in this quite place was go eat, watch TV and sleep. And that’s what we did exactly. Happily and lazily slept in the bed watching a part of Harry Potter, a part of Da Vinci code and a part of Run Away Jury.

Drive next day back home was more relaxing. Being the super bowl sunday, I was surprised to find people on the road. Some how I thought everybody would be so glued to the TV, but good that there were people like me who prefer anything other than the super bowl..

And BTW which anniversary is complete without the gift for the lady? huh? 😀